SHA-3 Round 1: Buffer Overflows

NIST is currently holding a competition to choose a design for the SHA-3 algorithm (Bruce Schneier has a good description of secure hashing algorithms and why this is important). The reference implementations of a few of the contestants have bugs in them that could cause crashes, performance problems, or security problems if they are used in their current state. Based on our bug reports, some of those bugs have already been fixed. Here's the full story:

The main idea behind the competition is to have the cryptographic community weed out the less secure algorithms and choose from the remainder. A couple of us at Fortify (thanks to Doug Held for his help) decided to do our part. We're not hard-core cryptographers, so we decided to take a look at the reference implementations.

This competition is to pick an algorithm, but all of the submissions had to include a C implementation, to demonstrate how it works and test the speed, which will be a factor in the final choice. We used Fortify SCA to audit the 42 projects accepted into Round 1. We were impressed with the overall quality of the code, but we did find significant issues in a few projects, including buffer overflows in two of the projects. We have emailed the submission teams with our findings and one team has already corrected their implementation.